Country star Dolly Parton’s Dollywood theme park in Tennessee is about to expand big time with a new hotel and more rides for fans of her music and families.
In an interview with The Associated Press, the “9 to 5” singer said that she’s most excited about bringing the resort to the park, located in the small town of Pigeon Forge. The hotel will be called the DreamMore Resort and is set to open in 2015.
“The thing we're most excited about is finally building our resort,” Parton said. “We're starting out with a resort that has 300 rooms. Some of the rooms will accommodate up to six people in a family.”
She added that she has been dreaming of adding a resort since she teamed up with the theme park in 1986.
According to World Property Channel, Dollywood previously opened the Dollywood Cabins in 2010, which offers “luxurious, amenity-rich cabins just two miles from Dollywood and Dollywood's Splash Country.”
The hotel will feature a lobby with a three-story window that shows Mount LeConte and the Smoky Mountains, and a lot of “front porch spaces,” according to Parton. She wants visitors greeted with lemonade in the summer and hot chocolate in the winter and a fishing pond for children.
This is all part of a $300 million expansion for Dollywood. It will start with a new family-oriented roller coaster in 2014.
Dollywood expects to have around 50,000 visitors a day. The singer noted that its proximity to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has helped bring visitors to the park since it opened.
"The national park has always been great for campers," Parton told the AP. "But people come and sometimes they like to say 'well, let's get out of these woods for a minute and let's go down to Dollywood.'"
image: Wikimedia Commons
